I first heard Ketjak in Fellini’s SATYRICON and then later when I studied Indonesian music as an undergraduate. Last year I heard a riveting realization of Ketjak in the film BARAKA. (see below) I love the first performance (above) for its raw power. I was taught that this was an example of hocketing, or […]
A fascinating poll on the Norman Lear Center website about the musical tastes of conservatives and liberals. I would be curious to redo this poll when all the baby boomers are senior citizens.
There are many interesting conclusions one can draw from this information and composers would do well to think long and hard about these […]
In the blogosphere, rankings get made from time to time. Scott Spiegelberg seems to have been the instigator a few years back in so-called classical music blogs. I have reblogged a new set of rankings by Classical Convert. Visit CC to get all the links for the blogs below. I notice that very few of […]
This just in from Angus (who else?). A perfect inspiration for a wonderful weekend for all you sexy musicians (and non-musicians as well) out there. This naughty prelude is in D flat (major I presume) with one flat on the D line. Hmmm. The time signature is in 2/2, sounds right. But why D flat? […]
One of the “joys” or habits many of us newspaper readers have is reading the obits, learning of someone’s passing, and offering up a personal sigh of appreciation of how they touched our lives. One such man showed up in today’s paper: Mahlon Clark, who died at age 84 in Los Angeles. Doesn’t sound familiar? […]
“Benward,” as we used to call him, was an excellent music theory teacher. I had him for two year. We were always proofing his new text books, so we never got the real publications, just grey photocopies Benward had “Ism-itis” and could cull down every trend in the 20th century with an ISM. ModernISM, mimalISM, […]
The Smirking Chimp dug up a marvelous piece of reseearch from Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, is entitled “Elvis to Eminem: Quantifying the price of fame through early mortality of European and North American rock and pop stars.” Why am I not surprised that rock stars’ health is not as robust as they get […]
I went to a party for our good friend Steve, just back from 6 months away, doing special effects for an upcoming movie about John Adams (the president, not the composer). During the party, he kept a looping slide show in the living room of candid snapshots of various places they worked around the world. […]
I founded a publishing company thirteen years ago called Yelton Rhodes Music, which publishes choral and chamber music. Our front page had a tendency to become stale easily, so we have recently launched a new blog called Choralicious! devoted to promulgating new choral music by our group of composers and arrangers. Our company started as […]
Frank Zappa wrote a song that said “Call any vegetable, call him by name…” The Vegetable Orchestra decided to play any vegetable and regularly bands together to show off the fruits of their labor. They were kind enough to share this video with us.
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